Jig of Life
by HeyiyaIf
Summary: There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief... The Luteces are looking for a particular variable. (Also, Bookerbeth. Just to see if I could).
1. Looking for a moment

**Usual disclaimers apply. Bioshock Infinite characters are owned by Irrational games.**

_There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief..._

- Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

* * *

><p>Rosalind remembers her parents back in England. How could she forget?<br>Her mother, always clear in her memory, a visionary and a born suffragette. Adamant that intellectual pursuits are not less important for a woman, but on the contrary, more so. You never know when knowledge will save your life.  
>Her father, more taciturn, less given to open displays of affection, but always there, a guardian. A man of his time, Rosalind always supposed. She knows she herself is not what most people would consider a 'warm' person. Calculus and levelheadedness is her strength, too. Interestingly, quite the opposite seems to have been the case with Robert. Always the visionary Robert, if a tad naïve.<br>And so, she supposes, in a sense it can be argued that they do not really share parentage. The respective gender of a child, what it inherits, can change its whole world. The same goes for the colour of its skin. How many changed variables does it take for you to stop being you, and being someone else instead? Who would Daisy Fitzroy have been, the Luteces wonder in unison, had her skin been peach rather than chocolate? Had she been man rather than woman?  
>Robert, sometimes, can agonize about these sorts of questions for hours on end. Rosalind herself is not given to this kind of sophistry, though she does feel gratitude. She knows she lucked out. There was a great deal of support for her intellectual pursuits in the Lutece home, tinged with a sorrow which she could feel viscerally, but never got any explanation for. They encouraged her to think about her own life. They never harried her about getting married or raising a family.<br>And, happily, she took off for high adventure, her diamond mind leading her down the roads and lanes and alleys of quantum physics, content that she was pursuing her calling to the fullest degree.  
>Not even when she told them she would be moving to America, accepting the lavish grant she had been offered, to pursue her study of the time-space continuum, did they protest, though she could see the muscles in her father's jaw work and her mother hugged her desperately before putting her on the steamliner. It all had a sense of foreboding to it which she did not, at the time, understand.<br>She knows more now of course. She would never return to England, not in the flesh.  
>Instead, she creates a city for her benefactor. She raises Columbia to the heavens, and there she listens and discerns and finds the cracks in the sky itself, through which Roberts familiar-yet-strange eyes peek back at her, like through a crack in an almost closed door. And for a while it is like that game of knocking on walls which she has heard that inmates of American prisons use to stave off madness when they are in solitary confinement. Knock knock, are you there? Yes. You are not alone.<br>And then the days come when Robert comes through to her, carrying the child, albeit incompletely of course, because the poor wretch of a father, in the end, hangs on to her for dear life. Selfishly, Rosalind reckons, for the child will be offered so much more here than a desperate debt-ridden ex-Pinkerton could ever give (she will later, reluctantly, modify that judgment, but she still can't _really_ regret it all. How could she, knowing what she knows?).  
>With Robert, of course, it is another matter. She always wonders why he was, is, will be willing to do it, but for many years, he won't talk about it. He clams shut like an oyster and won't say, but whatever Robert saw (sees, will se) when he dealt with the drunkard, the girls' real father, it has changed him. Vision, she realizes, is sometimes a cross to bear, and she does not pursue it. Far be it from her to pry when there is research to be done. Sometimes, sense and sensibility are best off leaving each other alone.<p>

It is not until they watch the girl in the tower growing into a young woman, that she, too, understands what they have done (are doing, must do). It is imperative that this girl become free. Free of Comstock, free of Columbia.  
>And so, while turmoil is brewing in the bowels of Columbia, Comstock has them murdered (rather spectacularly, Rosalind must admit) in an explosion of time and space, thereby unintentionally aiding rather than upsetting their plans.<br>And it is when she beholds Booker DeWitt for the first time, that Rosalind understands the silence of her brother.  
>And so it begins. Through the city and the tears the dance goes, while Rosalind must witness the splendid castles of ideas she built in various stages of decomposition. It isn't easy, dismantling your own preconceptions on the account of them being built on thin air, but she is nothing if not a scientist, and she will see it through, goddammit, if hell should bar the way. Sometimes she is gruffly pushing away Robert's offers of comfort for fear of bursting into tears, at other times just giving up, leaning into him and allowing herself a few short, awkward, tearless sobs.<br>Here, spread through the entirety of all known realities, he is the only other constant, the only other person she can really lean on. How ironic, she sometimes muses, that it is really herself she is leaning on, but then it comes back to her: how many variables does it take before you are not you anymore? He is Robert, not Rosalind, and that is enough. It will have to be enough.

The whole song-and-dance, Robert says, reminds him rather about the Vedic teachings of the Orient. The dance of Shakti, he elaborates, and she shakes her head and scoffs, because really, spiritualist poppycock is better left to the buffoons of the Golden Dawn, but of course in a sense he is right, and he is only here, and _she_ is only here, because reality is a far more vast thing than anyone could ever grasp. Even they.  
>And so she gives in and accepts his hand, dancing on a skyrail maintenance platform in the middle of the heavens while the tired man and the young woman are racing past them, and it all plays out in so many ways that were it not for her habit of taking meticulous notes, she would have soon lost track of it. There are, after all, many people making many choices in this city, day after day (Upon closer examination of the background of Daisy Fitzroy, Robert finds her broken down in hysterical, Homeric fits of laughter, from which she can barely recover long enough to let him in on the secret that Comstock already has a daughter, the result of the Prophet's post-baptismal rape of another housemaid called Anna, before Columbia even took to the clouds. Not that he would know or care, of course).<p>

And Daisy wages war against the Prophet of Columbia, or Comstock kills her before she can do it, or she leaves Columbia for good, or she gets arrested, or she kills him, or she emerges victorious only to find the house of the Prophet already long since abandoned. And through it all, the tired man and the young woman are running, always running, set us free, set us free.  
>Or he, she, they, die aiding Daisy's revolution, or – in one particularly memorable (though hardly comfortable) instance - the Bird becomes the Lamb and, seventy years later, like a terrible mother, demands that the False Shepherd keep his oath to her, which he does, smothering the life out of her to save her, all the while roaring in agony as his heart breaks and New York burns below.<p>

And Rosalind feels queasy in the new knowledge that, indeed, the sins of the parents are always visited upon the children, oftentimes whether they want to or no. Violence, it seems, runs deep like blood through the very veins of Columbia, and Rosalind ponders what she has done while she and Robert, like a pair of parents themselves, nudge, admonish, advise, cajole these two cosmic children, looking for a moment that Rosalind increasingly thinks will never happen, and she can't decide whether she is relieved or not. But Robert isn't, that much is clear, because New York is still going to burn, and it's Our Fault.  
>The 122nd trip on the merry-go-round is different. That's how she and Robert know they are approaching the solution they are looking for. They know it when they see Elizabeth dance in the sun before him. Like Shakti before Shiva, Robert reiterates, and Rosalind can only nod, mutely, because he was always the visionary and she is starting to grasp what that means.<br>And later, when the ancient Lamb is moved to mercy and lets her shepherd go, and the young girl is free of the siphon, and the baptism has been refused the first time and Booker DeWitt stands in the waters of his own impending sacrifice, the Lutece twins can only watch as his Elizabeth grabs his hand and disappears through a crack in the sky itself. Rosalind notes dryly that the lacing of the young lady's corset was broken. The sanatorium? she wonders, and sends Robert back to look, and he comes back not saying a word, but clearing his throat and correcting the collar of his shirt in a distinctly embarrassed manner.  
>In many ways, he later muses, it seems ironic that in the looming shadow of the 123rd dance, the one they feel rather confident will render void both Comstock and Columbia and possibly (though not with 100% percent certainty) themselves, for the better of the world, they got to witness what may have been their own creation, and Rosalind agrees (hiding a treacherous little tear behind a laced handkerchief) that it is all rather mythological indeed.<br>For what are we all if not each others daughters and sons and fathers and mothers and siblings and lovers?  
>But then, it is really rather obvious when one thinks of it. After all, 'Lutece' is the French form of Lutetia, the ancient name of Paris. And if this is the price of Paris, maybe it is worth paying.<p>

* * *

><p><em><strong><em><strong>I always thought part of the brilliance of Booker and Elizabeth's relationship is that it defies categorization, much like that of Rosalind and Robert. Both are damn near cosmic representations of the act of Relating itself, and its importance for us as beings.<br>But supposing a universe of endless possibilities…different choices are clearly made. This one among them doesn't seem far fetched.**_**_


	2. Creation

_But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate  
>So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late...<em>

_(All Along the Watchtower)_

The taste of bitter humiliation in her mouth. Having to lie leashed like an idiot with god-knows-what plugged into her spine, waiting. At the same time, an almost cathartic elation. As if she only now realizes how afraid she was that this was it; drugs and 'therapy' and no one coming, bye bye Elizabeth.

The abrupt silence after the noise could be cut in slices.

For once, his shell seems to be gone. His voice, when he reaches her, is quiet. As incredibly relieved as she feels. He removes the leash, horrrified and almost apologetic on behalf of the world, which is silly because it isn't as if he was the one who put it there.  
>She is enraged. Enraged with Zachary Comstock. 'Father' or whatever he calls himself.<p>

Yes, maybe that is what does it, the pure unadulterated humiliation of the leashing. A need to remove herself, or at least some part of herself, in some irreversible manner outside of the Prophet's jurisdiction ever again. And the fact that the nearest means to this end is the man standing there, breath still slightly laboured. Smelling of leather, dust, blood and gunpowder. She didn't know she missed his scent until her nostrils recognize it again, now. She turns, and there he is, her Booker, and there are things about him, many many things she didn't realize that she had noticed, until now. Difficult to sum up in any other way save, perhaps, to say that he is hers. Else he would not be here now.

And it almost physically hurts how much she suddenly wants to touch, be touched, all over.

She acts on instinct. At first, he seems confused, taken aback, but he is still drunk on blood, the pupils of his green cougar eyes are dilated (how many lives? does it matter right now?). He is like a drunken man suddenly thrown in a boxing ring. He has been alone, starved of any type of human relationship, for way too long to be able to reject her.

He tastes of salt, she experiences. Salt, and the strange new sensation of someone else's spit mixing with her own, and then the lace of her corset is torn, and all of her spilling out of it into his hands, and impatience and urgency against fear because we are alone, all alone, the two of us against the world is the only safety we have.

There is nothing elegant about any of it. At first, she has trouble locating herself under all those skirts. She is assisted then, a sense of hands on her thighs, wrists pushing the fabric up as they go, and she realizes the experience of the movement. It isn't lack of it that makes him tremble. She suddenly realizes it's fear, guilt in the knowledge that he is right now failing in vigilance. Equal parts despair and abandon in his movements. He is at war with himself, but she is winning. Winning easily.  
>You forget, Booker DeWitt. I know you. Just do what I want.<br>Perhaps he has heard her thoughts, because suddenly he seems almost angry. Clasping her jaw and lifting her chin, there is a growl , barely audible, somewhere in his chest and he bites her shoulder, the sharp pain of it surprising enough to make her yelp. She wonders, hazily, if he is trying to scare her off the whole idea. What idea, Elizabeth? Do you even know yourself?  
>She answers the question with angry legs, folding them around him and pushing her weight off this metal scaffold and onto his hips, bringing them unceremoniously crashing to the floor, him on his knees and staggering. She wonders why it is that she knows exactly what to do, wonders why she feels so completely in control when nobody ever let her ride a goddamn horse, but she merely puts her palm on his chest and pushes him back, back, like getting a horse to back up, and with a strange feeling that this has happened before, or maybe will happen again, or has happened a thousand times. She knows then, that right now, in this moment, she is ancient.<p>

His hips are sharp and desperate under her, clearly he knows it too. But he has given up, resigned to her and to himself. He helps and guides her along, and she no longer thinks about anything, for the knowledge that she takes from him is a surprise: that no actions of any man, no fathers or sons or lovers or brothers can fundamentally change who she is. And any small, short soreness is really mostly due to the haste of the entire undertaking, not anything else, and soon it's gone, replaced by the intense feeling of wild animal under her. And here, she no longer knows what to do. Suddenly she is just Elizabeth, she's nineteen, and there is a man here, and it's Booker, and he is awfully close, no, closer than close, and she might hit the ground in a thousand pieces if he doesn't catch her now.

Booker. Catch.  
>And he does.<p> 


	3. Puma (baptism)

**_ I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream ... the nation's hope is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead._**

**- Black Elk (1863–1950); medicine man, Oglala Lakota, Wounded Knee eyewitness**

.

_**The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.**_  
><em><strong>The nakedness of woman is the work of God.<br>Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.**_

**- William Blake: Proverbs, the Marriage of Heaven & Hell**

* * *

><p><em>Elizabeth.<em>

This Glorious Land is manured with enough blood to make the crop taste of ashes in his mouth.

He doesn't make a habit of remembering that day. But he knows why he is thinking of it now. It's the sudden snow and the wind on the bridge. As dead cold as that december morning, and it strikes him that Gran was right. We Lakota are an eagle people, she said, and that is a good thing, a strong ancestry (She never made no bones about how much she despised Father Witting, or 'the old crow' as she'd freely call him, to everyone and anyone who'd be listening, including Father Witting. Which would have been real sweet if it hadn't been for the fact that her own bloody grandson was the one who'd had to attend school at the church every sunday and had his plate full already what with being a, quote unquote, 'goddamn mutt'.)  
>Yeah, he'd wanted to say, so if that eagle spirit was so strong how come I had such an easy time killin' it and pissin' on its corpse afterwards? How come ma never spoke in the tongue o' the tribes to me after that day? She sent me to the army to become a white man, didn't she? Or a warrior or whatever. I brought scalps, didn't I? Isn't that what we do?<p>

But he knows it isn't, not like that. Not to sell them for thirty dollars apiece to superior officers. And how could he ever explain that the barely veiled disgust and horror in their faces was the only way he could think of to exact revenge, on himself and on them? How come, Gran, that I can't fucking fly like an eagle and pick that fat, overgrown Songbird out of the sky?  
>He learned to read during those sundays, at least, though to this day he isn't sure Gran considered that a relevant skill at all, and in view of his chosen profession (murder) that would seem to be the second thing she was right about.<p>

Black feathers on his left hand (more like 'left claw', DeWitt), reminds him of the choice he made, like running your tongue over a sore tooth again and again. It's bloody perverse, really, how much he gets off on it, but old habits die hard, and even though he can't wash the stain off, he enjoys siccing the crows back on the bastards now. There's some real poetry in that. The revenge of a dead people, though if that is true, he can't imagine why the birds haven't long since hacked out his eyes too. Bein' sired by some plastered Dutchman on the prettiest mestiza in the neighbourhood doesn't exactly make him Crazy Horse, does it?  
>What it did was make sure his hide got tough and his wits keen, and so help him if they so much as touch her...but they already have, and the sounds of her screams come back, then. They snap something in him shut and something else open, he doesn't know which. He just picks up speed.<p>

Another dormitory. The first of those helmeted things saw him at the entrance, and it called the maniacs immediately present. The dispatching of them slowed him down considerably. He stops abruptly, and inhales deeply, forcing his breath slow, deliberate. Then he keeps it in and closes his eyes, listening to the dead, dank surfaces around him, the dry, subdued scuffle of the lunatics.

Like rats in the walls.

He thinks of the puma, how he's seen it move in the ravines near Gran's shack, that's how to do it, like Puma, keeping the rifle horizontal in one's fist, floating with your movements like a buoyant duck feather. And he moves on, circling behind the Silent Boy (the most fitting name he can think of for that wretched thing).  
>It doesn't perceive him. The rat people shuffle on along the walls, voiceless, husks more than actual human beings.<p>

He doesn't want to look at them.

Incredibly, Gran continued to speak sioux with him, though of course she died not many years after. '92, he reckons.

_This place is bad medicine,_ and at this point he spots another figure in the twilight and one who doesn't seem to be a rat person. The guy is armed. Launching into action he runs up to the back of him and cuts his throat open with the skyhook. This means, of course, that his cover is blown, and he celebrates it by crying out, laughing like a jackal at the men in the galleries overlooking the elevator. Then he withdraws to the shadows again and stays there while they mill about and shout, staying on the prowl and keeping his eyes used to the dark, scoping them out one by one, Elizabeth, what are they doing to you? Elizabeth, and the singular one who thinks he managed to sneak up on him gets the skyhook, warm blood like rosepetals on his face as the carotid artery opens up.

It's the despair he can hear in the ever more numerous voxophones that threatens to drive him mad. Not the white men. They sting him like mosquitoes but he doesn't care much, though a couple of his ribs are increasingly annoying him. There is a compass somewhere in his chest, pointing to the voice on those recordings, and he paces the halls of this cursed dungeon, growling and clawing at its walls, looking for a way forward, a way to her.  
>Suddenly there she is, reaching down and grabbing his hand, and he stands aloft on a building, like on a mountain of fire, and for a moment he thinks it's Gran who has come back to show him the way.<br>It isn't. It breaks in him. No. They can't have done this to her.  
>I was coming!<br>She points. He obeys. How could he not? And then, surreal, the fire fades and so does Elizabeth, no, Gran, no, _Elizabeth, there is still time,_ and he takes off again, plodding swiftly down the hallway, the holler of pain calling, the blood on his fangs and claws bared, and through glowing eyes it senses her, senses the woman and the prey around her, the foolish prey that doesn't know it's prey. Golden flashes of fur in the dark, compass pointing the way, mine, mine not yours, and abruptly it's quiet but for a final, pathetic whimper from the dying doctor. Last lever, turned. Puma pads down the hallway, while the last one falls prey to her, down there. Somewhere on the way up to her, Booker remembers himself.

He feels naked without a pelt. Soft white noise of rolling blood in his ears. He gingerly puts the rifle down before approaching the table she is laid out on.  
>His hands are shaking but that thing has to be dismantled from her, and preferrably yesterday.<br>'You ready?'

'Just do it.' And he does.

She tries to be brave, but still the resulting cry is like a knife in his brain, all his senses still in overdrive.  
>Her back is. Her back. The nape of her neck under black hair. She turns towards him.<br>Elizabeth?

Yes.

_Oh Lord, help me._

But there is no lord, only the woman, young and ancient with a blue skirt hiding an ocean for both of them to drown in.

Like a wave she crashes over him.  
>And puma is neither sinner nor saint, just puma, just parched. In the end, he catches her and laps the tears falling down onto his face like holy water.<p>

* * *

><p><strong>If anyone is reading this – I hope you like it. ~Y.<strong>


	4. I Can't See New York

**_'Tracking the beacon here_**

**_Is there a signal there?_**

**_On the other side…'_**

**_ -'I can't see New York' (Tori Amos)_**

**_._**

**_'Left alone in desert_**

**_This house becomes a hell_**

**_This love becomes a tether_**

**_This room becomes a cell_**

**_How long must I suffer?_**

**_Dear god, I've served my time_**

**_This love becomes my torture_**

**_This love my only crime'_**

**_ -'Send His Love To Me' (P J Harvey)_**

* * *

><p>Darkness. Moonlight falling on floors through bars, always through bars. The dust motes dancing in the air like small living things, her only company. She wanders through long corridors, all empty - all hands are on deck, upstairs, outside, taking the Big Apple for her glory. And why not? It's not like it matters anymore anyway. The red glow and the noise is below, far away. It has nothing to do with her anymore. This is her hunting ground, her underworld. This house is full of her mistakes, her regret, like her withering, useless flesh. Disappointment festers like rot in the carrying beams. Hatred eats away at the wooden floorboards like termites.<p>

She moves at a slow, steady pace. Lately, her hip has been giving her trouble but she hides it. She knows it terrifies them, how vital she always were for her age. It's not an advantage she is willing to give up easily. The last twenty-one hours she has taken to just standing, refusing to sit down lest she should never get back up again. Her wry amusement in watching the officers getting paler and sweatier with each hour past her bedtime kept the exhaustion at bay.  
>All her life, she has been purpose. Nothing but Purpose. Will.<p>

Whose will? To do what?  
>She knows not. But she knows she is dying. The syphon was shut down recently. 'I will add what foresight God has granted me to our efforts', she assured, though they have long since stopped listening. Clearly they no longer perceive her as a threat. And they are right, she isn't. She isn't, and the knowledge of it is bitter in her mouth.<p>

She stops then for a moment, gasping, in the entrance to the galleries surrounding the central stair and the elevator. The sudden smell of blood, or rosepetals, a heady, spinning feeling. Yellow eyes and a whisper of movement passing through her soul. She closes her eyes wistfully and exhales, trembling and long.  
>Old, half-forgotten memories stir, like waves gently lapping her lonely dinghy and turning it, ever so slowly, towards a lighthouse, far far away.<br>When she opens her eyes again, she is still purpose, but purpose anew. A signal, where?

Briskly, she enters the elevator, reaches out a finger haltingly towards its button, then changing her mind, slamming the back of her fist into it instead.  
>Down. Then out. She turns down the halls she knows so well. She takes to crossing over the floor, paces measuring the distance from one wall to another, mumbling to herself, hands with bluish-white skin as thin and soft as old parchment reaching out onto the walls, touching, searching in the cracks. In the twilight her face is pale and weathered, like the moon, but there is no one to see it.<p>

Days pass. She remembers. Remembers so much these days. As if the ability to tear was not the only thing that was siphoned away from her, and now isn't.

They killed Songbird not long after he brought her back. 'Disabled' they said, because he was no longer necessary. Why it was that they suddenly felt so sure about it, she never understood. But she knows the difference between killing and disabling. They killed him. And when she cried, they called her out on how selfish she was.  
>Slowly working her way down the hall, ears pressed to the walls and hands grasping for clues, she hums a tune under her breath.<p>

_I grieve and dare not show my discontent_

_I love and yet am forced to seem to hate…_

There! A small, static spark on her fingertips. Still, even with the power surging unhindered, it is like speaking a long forgotten dead language. Like dancing a jig in the sun in Battleship Bay when she hardly remembers sunlight anymore. She hums on:

_I do, yet dare not say I ever meant_

_I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate_

_I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned…_

As her reading would have it, the poem consists of three sestet stanzas, each in iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme following the ABABCC pattern. It was written by her name-sister, Elizabeth I. of the Royal house of Tudor. Supposedly to string along the Duke of Anjou or soften her rejection of his marriage proposal, in which case the sincerity of the poem is questionable. Huh. Figures.

_No means I find to rid him from my breast,  
>Till by the end of things it be suppressed.<em>

Though of course it might have been written for Robert Dudley, but who knows. Now, aha, here is the hook, now just to pull, to tug….

_Let me or float or sink, be high or low;  
>Or let me live with some more sweet content,<br>Or die, and so forget what love e'er meant…_

And she is through.  
>The surge of power brings down the wall behind her, exposing the vista of New York burning below.<br>But she ignores it, intent on the tear, like a mirror before her. At first she is unsure what she sees, so unused are her eyes to it, now. Like a mirror, the opposite wall inside the tear is crumbling and she gasps, suppressing a cry as the red-eyed silhouette of Songbird breaks through, pouncing on something on the ground she can barely make out in the shadows until, shrieking, he takes off again, leaving the broken body of the man on the ground, and she calls, Booker, no!

The tear shuts. Distraught, she claws the wall, hammering with weak fists on the cold mortar. Wideeyed, she backpedals a few steps, then sinks to the floor, like a rare, sickly plant at the center of a sea of velvet.

He came for her.

Booker came.

Songbird killed him, but he did come for her.

They lied.  
>Scrapped Songbird, and lied.<p>

And _she believed them!_

A dry, enraged sob escapes her then..

All real tears long since wept. Lips too dry to be kissed.  
>But rage, rage she has aplenty.<br>Gaining support from the wall, she manages to get herself upright again. Miss Lutece's words suddenly emblazoned across her mind.

Came. Comes. Will come.

It has become an obsession, she rebukes herself, but the tired war counsels with her quarrelsome officers are such a bore. She knows she is escaping her Duty and that it is a Sin, but still she continues.  
>Striding on a few steps from last time, she attacks the wall again at a new point.<p>

Another mirror. He fights like a demon, laughing joylessly at Songbird as it mangles his body, again.

Calling out in frustration, she slams it shut.

Another.

Songbird's left eye is bashed in, irreparably so, but it's huge and the man is a wandering dead, always dead.

Another.

Another.

Her eyes are like granite, only a slight movement at the wings of her nose as she searches through the tears, counting his deaths. Then she turns, and for the first time she sees New York burning below. And she realizes, there and then, that it is the city of her birth whose destruction she is witnessing. There is no way anyone can stop this. What was she thinking?

The generals have taken to arguing, now, like she knew they would. It was really just a matter of time before they'd all realize the obvious scapegoat staring them in the face. That is when they decided to lock her up in here. 'For the safety of Our Lady and her splendid City.'  
>She chuckles to herself. The irony.<br>So here she is again, locked up. Always locked up.  
>She scribbles her thoughts in code, like she always did her diaries, drawing a picture of a cage at the bottom of the page, for good measure.<br>Then, closing her eyes, she whispers under her breath, soundless words stringed together like pearls over her lips and she wonders, idly, whether she has truly gone mad, whether she was always mad like they said she was, _because_ she believed them, or in spite of _not_ believing them.  
>And then: whirling around, striding towards the wall, visible veins on the backs of her hands throbbing with intent as she grasps and wills open another tear, suppressing a groan because she is Our Lady of Columbia and ladies don't groan but, oh God, please, sweet Mother of Jesus, I'm begging you…<p>

And there he stands, below, and she knows he feels old and tired (she knows because that is how she felt when she was even younger than he is now). But oh, he is young, so young, and at the same time older than she was, exactly like she remembers.  
>She sighs. She is so weary. So, so weary.<p>

"As you can see, Booker, the lunatics are running the asylum…"

He is confused. Reaching down, she helps him up on the ledge with her, the pulsing energy of the tear lending her strength. He looks at her and the burning city with widening eyes, distraught, and she bites back a quip, have you never seen an old woman before, boy?

For a brief moment, years don't exist and her first instinct is to quite simply kiss him. But conditioning kicks in and she knows that while she has travelled the long way round, the blue fabric around his right hand is still stained with fresh blood, and she is too old and her soul too shriveled to be able to muster more than a dull, remote ache, the memory of something she never got the opportunity to find out what was. Time rots everything, Booker. Even hope.

She remembers the poem then:

_….die, and so forget what love e'er meant…_

She wants him to kill her. Yes, that is what she wants.

"I was coming!" His voice is breaking. She feels like an executioner.

Came. Comes. Will come.  
>She still wants to die of course.<p>

_Yeah, well, I want a puppy. That doesn't mean I'm gonna get one._

"No. It is too late for me. I brought you here for _your _sake. Yours and hers."

Is this what grace feels like? She doesn't know, she has no previous experience to compare it with. But she'd like to think so, and for a fleeting moment she considers giving her coded thoughts for him to pass on, but then the sense of all of her kicks in. Her bitterness dissolved, it is uninhibited at last, and she knows exactly who and what and where and when she is. And she knows that, while another Her is passing on on this advice, to effects that are clear in her mind's eye, this choice is not for her. Her vengefulness is for her, and her alone. She sighs in relief. At least she will have this singular purpose. Spreading her arms towards the sky, she drinks in the sight of him one last time, then sets him on the path.

And again, she is alone.  
>Turning, she walks slowly down the hallway. At the top of the stairs, she stumbles, manages not to fall, but a rusty nail protruding from the wall gets hold of the lacing on her back. The ancient lace tears and gives way, springing the corset open.<p>

Chuckling, she disentangles herself from its remains, leaving it behind on the floor like the pitiful carcass of some long dead animal, while its former prisoner disappears into the womb of the house again.


	5. Were you there?

**Samhain, or All Hallows, is a time to remember the dead, to face grief and ghosts. So it seemed the right day to post this chapter. All spirits and souls of Wounded Knee, I offer this to honour you. **

**Were you there on the wind  
>That hammered the plains?<br>Were you there on the wind  
>To scatter their names? I'll ask you again<br>Were you there on the wind?**

**- Grant Lee Buffalo**

_My kill-hand's  
>tatooed E.V.I.L. across it's brother's fist<br>That filthy five! They did nothing to challenge or resist._

_Johnny Cash - The Mercy Seat (cover)_

_(29th of December, 1890)._

The shouts over there are getting louder. For a moment, it's like the officer almost manages to get Yellow Bird to let go.

Then the rifle goes off.

Shit, shit, shit, and he starts running.

,The shot rings out against the rocks of the gulch, the slience below the sound is deafening.

Like everything is taking a deep breath.

It's happening when he gets back there. Several Oglala hunters already lie sprawled on the ground around the body of the officer from before, supposedly the first to fall, but who knows, not he.  
>As he runs up to the entrance of the sick chief's tipi, he hears another shot from in there. Then a pair of his comrades, Slate and some other guy, duck out from under the tent flap. The fevered look on their faces is one he'll end up dreaming about for the next twenty years, because it's mirrored in the passing reflection of his own face in a bucket of water.<p>

Everything is chaos.  
>Yellow Bird is holed up in another one of the tipis with his rifle, as Booker learns when for the first time in his life, he is shot. The bullet pierces his upper arm, the force of it slamming him to the ground, which is likely what saves his life from the following salvo.<p>

Panic has scattered the tribe, some running this way and some the other. Most of the hunters who tried to defend the families are already dead, their charges tumbling blindly into the countryside with no direction save away, away from the bluecoats. As for said bluecoats, not much of a semblance of order seems to remain in their ranks either. The initial anger and panic at the death of the officer has given way to something else, something sinister. The comrades are almost cocky, as if they were on leave. Inbetween clashes with the Oglala, guns are fired into the air as if just for the heck of it. Their eyes are shining. Their faces are white as the snow underfoot, pale as death.

Then the other one is there. An Oglala hunter, though he is certainly younger than Booker himself is, standing in front of a tipi, armed with a front-loader, pointing at him, anger and desperation in his face. Booker ducks forward, tackling the hunter's legs, sending them both sprawling to the ground. The front-loader goes off into the air but the hunter is quick and lithe like a cat, he draws his tomahawk. Clashing, struggling, locked together like in a tender embrace, they fight, the hunter to get a strike in towards Booker's head or upper torso, Booker to frustrate his efforts, and out of the corner of his eye he registers a glint of metal and reaches, without thinking and grabs and stabs…. and blood. Blood rising into the mouth of the other man. His eyes widen. And then his tomahawk arm falls down limp, as if on a puppet where someone cut the strings.

Booker backpedals, rising halfway, then tumbling backwards in through the entrance of the tipi, gets up, turns around.

There they sit, the embers of a low fire still lighting their faces from beneath, a soft, orange glow. An ancient Grandmother, two or three women the age of his mother, trying to hide the smallest children from his sight, and maybe seven young women and girls. Very young. Some younger than him. All quiet as mice.  
>He looks at them, dumbfounded. Then he realises he is still holding the knife with which he killed his opponent outside. Looking down his shirt, he realizes he is all but covered in something red. Red and sticky.<p>

They all watch him, unmoving but following his every move.  
>Shuddering, he turns and is about to just walk out again, forget he ever saw them. Then he hears it. The crowing outside.<p>

"Well I'll be, boys. Looks like the injun boy lead us straight to the good catch!"

It's sarge.

He freezes up, face inches from the closed tent flap. He turns again, facing the inhabitants of the tipi once more.  
>"Ya goin' to keep them squaws all to yerself, DeWitt?" and the others laugh and whoop, segueing into a mock choir of howling coyote.<p>

The eyes of the younger girls, who comprehend, go wide. Tightening their bodies against the words, they cling even harder to their children - or in the case of some, their younger siblings. It is all the translation the Grandmother needs. Looking from the tent flap, then towards the women and then back again, in the end her eyes settle on him. Reaching out slowly, as if with great effort, she picks up a burning piece of wood from the fire. A long, slender birch branch. She hobbles up up to him and, patting his cheek while he stands mute like the big child he acutely is again, she hands him this makeshift torch and gives one, curt nod. The hunters are all dead. You are but a boy. You can't defend us.

They are like shilouettes behind her, in the dark. He can hear their breaths, slightly louder and quicker than normal. And he can hear their hearts pounding like a war drum in his ears, or maybe that's just his own. And the buffalo felt is greasy with lanolin, and the corn stalks for kindling are piled by the door, right by the door.

When he ducks back out under the tent flap he can already feel the warmth of the flames growing to a searing heat on his back, and perhaps that is the reason why the others look so horrorstricken. Perhaps.  
>Not sarge, though. He scowls in suspiscion as usual, barely seems to notice the subdued, anguished moans starting to emerge from under the smoke and the crackling fire, and if he doesn't hear them, neither does Booker (but he does, oh, he does, and the pride in the Grandmother's eyes are in his head and), he just glares fiercely back: "Didn't know you were into red pussy, sarge", and then he draws his knife and bends down over the body of the the fallen hunter, a boy, he sees now, of maybe fourteen summers, and he removes the top tuft of his hair in one swift stroke (<em>why didn't you fucking stay alive and defend your women and children, *our* women and children?!<em>), leaving his officer to shake his head in wonder and awe at the rising bonfire, "bloody injun, a bloody white injun is what you are, DeWitt".

The White Injun bares his teeth at them, picks up his rifle and takes off into the gulch, and his comrades crow and follow, _hell yeah_, their heads swimming with elation and terror and hatred, and they start calling, _heeere kitty kitty kitty, come on out li'l red girl, come on out_, and he runs faster to get ahead. Crossing through the shrubbery he enters his first hunt, hunting frightened does to kill them one after the other, before his comrades get to them, with the Grandmother's eyes in his head, in his head, watching all that he does and the blood stains red in the snow. The smallest ones die with quiet whimpers, like coneys, And the collection of scalps in his belt grows while the weight of all their souls fly up to hang themselves on his sternum until he feels like he is made of lead.

In the end, it is like the silence of the Land never breaks. The Land just looks on, everything that happens is like a minor disturbance, and he can't understand how through it all, the current of the creek just keeps running, so quickly, while its waters go red, but only for a moment and then it's all washed away, like a lump of inconsequential ochre, or a bucket of spilled milk.  
><em>Don't cry over spilled milk<em>, and Booker doesn't cry, he never cries, never ever after this day.


	6. Thunderbird (the dark night of the soul)

_night lay your body down_  
><em>sun in the west<em>  
><em>sun rising<em>  
><em>night lays her body down<em>  
><em>in the west<em>  
><em>star rising<em>  
><em>in the west<em>

_lay your body down_

_night rising_

_sun lays his body down_  
><em>night down<em>  
><em>in the west<em>  
><em>sun rising<em>  
><em>night's belly, full of sun<em>  
><em>full of graves<em>  
><em>in the west<em>

_raven shadowed sun_  
><em>night rising<em> **__**

**_Eivør - Night's Body_**

* * *

><p>He must have been something else, once. Probably this is true. He doesn't recall what, or even if. It is of no consequence compared to her.<p>

His circuits are wrapped around his nerve endings, carefully tuned to the imprint, the imprint that allows him to Know.

It's thunder that keeps him going. White sparks through his veins and around coils.

Her image, hundreds of feet of stone, is the landmark that grants him orientation. Like a lighthouse. There is always a lighthouse. On top of its reaches, their nest.

While clouds rolled overhead, he took to the skies, holding her in tender talons, white and squirming like a young buffalo calf, away from the puma. The beating of her heart reverberated in his circuits, though its rhythm had a cadence he couldn't recognize, a song that said 'puma' rather than 'nest'.

It made him yellow inside.

He brought her home, but then, the melody, that melody which seems to erase his mind and leaves him with nothing but memories of ancient faces. Normally, this means safety and green and belonging, but not this time. When the melody ended, the nest was empty.

Since then, he can't find her. He peeks into the nest. Canvasses with pictures of iron towers stand abandoned. Atop of her beacon he throws out his eagle eyes and sees nothing, he sharpens his hearing and hears no singing. The thunder inside makes the yellowness all consuming. It feels like blindness.

After a couple of days he circles above the Big House, when he feels her screaming, cortisol and adrenaline and pain. She is being touched by men's hands, men in white coats with leashes and syringes. The pictures flash in him and inject him with redness and two imperatives cross. Why does the nest no longer work? She should be safe with him. Why is she red when he brought her to the green place? How has he failed? He claws at the roof to get to her when the shock hits him. The siphon's power which normally is on his side is now directed towards him. The circuits scream pain into his nerves. The compass spins and confuses him, his fuses are bust. Then the theme, the song, and after it a new sequence. The command is simple: return to nest, remain.

He realises he is spiralling downwards towards the waters of the bay, and he spreads his wings, avoiding disaster in the last possible moment.

He ends up in the nest again, searching aimlessly for her there. After that, he remains there and avoids the Big House because the pain blinds him. She must come back.

But she doesn't.  
>He feels strangely heavy and stiff, like the iron on his wings is foreign, not part of him. There is a strange clarity in him, like seeing the world with more colours than just the three. He doesn't know how to interpret it, and thus he stays atop, talons clinging to the image of her, unable to navigate because there is too much to see.<br>The increasing lucidity brings images within too, and knowledge. If he spreads his wings now, the clumsy armor will bring him down. The circuitry is broken, dead. He has no Thunder. No choice but to wait until they... repair him.

Repair him. The feeling in his sinews at the thought is, for want of better concepts (and he has none other) red. Or maybe yellow and red. He is not sure he wants to be Repaired.

The disc of the sun passes overhead and his wings are weighed down by the metal, baking in the heat. Night brings little respite. Thunderstorms in the west remain inland. He watches the lightning hit the plains and feels... wistful.

_Wistful. _It's a word which is neither yellow or green. Neither here nor there.

And then the signal again, the song in his head or without, but in his nerves, in his own nerves, not from the circuits which are still dead. It doesn't matter now that the Big House is far away, for distance is irrelevant to this. This is the Imprint. He has never felt anything like it. Male hands on her like a rake through his brain. Scent and pheromones and little calf with a belly full of sun.

Screaming in despair or joy, red and green, he knows not which, he spreads his wings and with abandon, takes off. He has no time to realise where he wants to go but his eyes are fixed on the sun, like it just rolled out of his mouth with the scream.  
>Her moaning hits him squarely in the chest like an arrow and this time he falls away, straight from the blinding light of that burning disc into Battleship Bay. Maybe he lets himself fall, the image of the ancient Her in his heart. Hitting the water like a concrete wall, his armor shatters. Like a naked thing he falls through the depth, watching the steel carcass of his exoskeleton fall below, while he himself gently floats in the water, suddenly so light, and he feels like a newborn. He will die now, and he will die with her name unspoken in his beak. It is not a bad death.<p>

The glass spheres of his eyes are cracking and this might be why he sees her like that. Her hair is grey. She is behind glass. She mouths his name.

_Thunderbird._

She is the only one who ever called him that.

He drifts towards her. Her face is like life. She pulls him in.

The rift closes, the sea in Battleship Bay implodes with a clap of thunder upon the empty space where he was.


End file.
